His name is Yacouba Diarra, he is 14 and he is a child slave.
Smuggled across the boarder he was brought to the cocoa-producing heartland in Ivory Coast from his village in Mali by trackers who promised him $135 for a year’s labor.
Chocolate with a bitter taste
How fair is “fair”?
Switzerland is said to be the land of where the finest of all chocolate is produced. The question is: what is it that makes chocolate so fine? Is it the smooth taste? Is it its consistency? The quality of the ingredients used? Yes, it´s all that. But there are some more aspects that one could or should pay attention to.
View full article »Interview with Scot Stevenson
Scot W. Stevenson as a journalist works with the news agency Reuters and is also publishing the Internet blog usaerklaert.wordpress.com. As an online journalist he has been nominated for the Golden Prometheus Award 2009 of German journalism.
View full interview »Thoughts on Opinions – and Other Things
Different opinions on a subject are a human habit. The most recent example would be the American elections. Whose side were you on? I supported Barack Obama. I’ve never met him, but I’ve been told he is a very interesting person. Other people may not agree, and that’s fine with me.
View full article »An interview with Kolja Blacher
Why did you become a musician?
First of all I come from a background in which music has always played a predominant role. My parents were both very famous musicians as well, and as it turned out I already developed a great passion for music when I was about 5 years old. I was also intensely tutored from a very early age onwards.
View full interview »Editorial Remarks
Intercultural Times No. 19
The renascence of our electronic newspaper shall mean a change in content as well as in format. Globalization has progressed with all its tensions as nobody would have expected at the end of the past century, and clashes within cultures have opened even where similarity seemed guaranteed by history as in the relationship between the European Union and the United States of America.
The forebodings of the Presidential election reveal cultural differences in fields of religion and education. On the other hand India and China have westernized. And their large metropolitan areas look like Manhattan.
Berlin seems even small and neat in comparison to Shanghai and Shenzhen. On the other hand it gets more and more appreciated by the New Yorkers culturally. And Big Apple despite its size and economic power, its traffic and noise shows some similarity in its old-fashioned snugness and metropolitan outspokenness. But some differences lie deeper and may tell us about our own multicultural drawbacks.
Though the cultural tensions within our city have increased since 1998, there is also a positive development in the fields of intercultural music, literature and art, which has even caused The New York Times to praise Berlin as “the most cultured city in Europe”.
A change of format has certainly to do with the development of the Internet. The technical possibilities have not only enhanced the speed of information, but also the mutually balanced exchange of opinions via chats and blogs.
September 2008